In 2011, APEC Ministers adopted the APEC Consolidated Counter-Terrorism and Secure Trade Strategy. The Strategy identifies three fundamental pillars in APEC’s approach to countering terrorism and securing commerce: security, efficiency and resilience. Enhancing capacity-building in major event security integrates all three of the Strategy’s fundamental pillars – securing event participants from terrorist attacks, ensuring that major events take place in a secure and efficient environment, and building resilience such that tourism and related infrastructure recovers quickly from disruptions.
APEC economies are increasingly awarded hosting privileges for major events: Russia hosted the Olympics in 2014, Korea will do so in 2018; Brunei chaired ASEAN, and hosted the related summits, in 2013; China will hosted APEC in 2014, the Philippines in 2015, and Peru in 2016; /09/2016Korea hosted the World University Games in 2015, and Chinese Taipei in 2017. There is a need to ensure that security for these events is carefully planned, executed and closed-out.
In March 2016, Canada funded a five day workshop on major events security framework in PNG. This workshop was a huge success and helpful to PNG as they will be hosting APEC in 2018. Viet Nam will be hosting APEC in 2017. In preparation for this event, this project is proposing to run a similar five day workshop on the Major Events Security Framework.
A Canadian expert will travel to Viet Nam in 2016 to offer a 5 day workshop on the MESF to Vietnamese security officials in the context of the APEC Counter-Terrorism Working Group. By the end of the workshop delegates will have a solid understanding of major event planning, captured lessons learned shared from other economies and will have developed experience in putting together plans. As an added benefit, the delegates will have built relationships and networks with key subject matter experts. The exercise will draw on the APEC MESF to provide Viet Nam with the opportunity to discuss the early phases of their planning with Canadian experts who have experience with major event security in a range of settings. Table-top exercises using Viet Nam’s APEC meeting as the scenario will be included in the workshop.
Canada has extensive experience conducting workshops on the subject of major event security. For the 2016 APEC workshop in Peru, Canada led the MESF exercises. Dr Masys is an internationally recognized expert, author, speaker and facilitator and has held workshops in Europe, North America, South America and Asia/Pacific region. The SME was the facilitator for the recent CTCBP funded major events framework workshop in PNG. He will be responsible for contextualizing the training material to Viet Nam. He will also be responsible for delivering the training.